We all remember the scene - the flimsy, wood-frame compound with flames pouring from the windows, the tank pulling its nozzle out of the thin siding, the sudden "whoomph" of the fireball, and the shimmering superheated air rising over the Texas plain. The Apocalypse came to Waco, and the Branch Davidian community perished in the conflagration of their final conflict with the forces of evil. They regarded their leader, David Koresh, as the true prophet for our time. While the F.B.I. called him a con-man and a criminal, his followers saw in him the one man sent by God to interpret the Book of Revelation, the one prophet who could understand the Seven Seals. Indeed, for those within his compound, every prophecy turned out to be true. The prophetic people of the Branch Davidians were being persecuted, surrounded and hounded by unbelievers who threatened them with powerful weapons. They knew that the final battle would be a trial by fire - a trial they could face in confidence that they would rise again and triumph. And when the tanks came, they set those fires to thwart their enemies and so they died, together with God's anointed prophet for our time.
The cult in Waco was one of the most dramatic, but is certainly not the only apocalyptic cult. Members of another cult in Japan poisoned the air in the Tokyo sub-ways. Shortly thereafter, members of yet another committed suicide and murder in Switzerland. All believed they were in a particularly dramatic time in spiritual history, and all believed that they were playing a special, distinctive role in this apocalyptic age. They believed they were chosen to follow the single leader anointed and certified by God.
Among Catholics we hear apocalyptic messages from many sides. Some come through saints or acknowledged visionar-ies. Some are speculative. Some rest on the dubious reports of unknown seers. Some hint that we may be on the verge of the Second Coming of Christ. However, they all point to this age as a time of especially intense spiritual activity. The many dramatic events in the world (such as two world wars and the Holocaust) and in the Church (for instance, the Second Vati-can Council and the apparitions at Fatima), as well as the dynamic, prophetic character of re-cent Church movements, have created an atmosphere of apoca-lyptic expectation. And that atmos-phere creates opportuni-ties for human pride and ambition - especially for the self-appointed Prophet for Our Time (P.O.T.)
The Scriptures and Church history clearly show that God does work in history. The book of Genesis tells us that God called one man, Abram, and promised to make his descen-dants a great nation - this to an old man who had no chil-dren. After those same descendants had lived as slaves for 400 years, God spoke to another man, Moses, and led them to freedom. Pursued by one of the great armies of that age, the people of Israel found themselves pinned against the Sea of Reeds, with no escape. Then God intervened dramatically to let them cross the sea, while he destroyed Pharaoh's pursuing army. Shortly afterwards, God gave them his Law - the Ten Commandments - on Mount Sinai. Forty years later, God led them into the Promised Land, powerfully defeating their enemies. Later he gave them a king "after the Lord's own heart" and promised this king, David, a dynasty that would last for-ever. When Israel sinned, God sent prophets as his spokes-men to call them back. When they persisted in sin, he pun-ished them with seventy years of exile.
The New Testament is the story of God's greatest intervention in history - the in-carnation of God the Son as the man, Jesus. God himself was born in a stable in Bethle-hem. He walked the earth, healing and teaching and driving out the devil. Jesus was then arrested, tried, and cruci-fied, but on the third day he rose from the dead. Led by the Holy Spirit and relying on his power, Jesus' disciples spread his Gospel throughout the civilized world.
I belabor these points because many people - especially the most educated - no longer believe that God actu-ally does intervene in human affairs. Even many Catholic theologians and clergy will call it "fundamentalism" to believe that God actually does things in our world. But if God did not and does not intervene in the world, both on his own initiative and in response to our prayers, then Scrip-ture is fundamentally false.
God did not stop acting in history when the Apostle John died on Patmos. Pope John XXIII prayed for God's intervention when he asked for a new Pentecost at the Second Vatican Council. And that same Council called on us all to recognize the "signs of the times", so that we can respond to what God is doing. And if we look to the history of the Church we can see God's action again and again - from St. Benedict's establish-ment of monasticism to St. Maximilian Kolbe's martyrdom at Auschwitz, from St. Francis' witness of simplicity to the sophisticated learning of the early Jesuits, from the eight-million Indian conversions following Mary's apparitions at Guadalupe to the collapse of Communism following her influence in Fatima. God does act in history, and he uses human agents.
Our own age certainly seems to be a time of dramatic spiritual change. For the past 300 to 400 years, mankind has tried more and more to "go it alone" without God. Man has eclipsed God to become master of his own destiny. As the 20th Century broke, he saw his world as full of promise. Science was - supposedly - on the verge of a com-plete understanding of the world. American and European political and military leaders thought they had found the keys to perma-nent peace and prosperity. God's place, if he had one at all, was on the fringes. More and more, educated people thought of religion as something merely personal, if not downright superstitious. Human reason was all we needed to bring about the good life.
This century did not turn out as planned, of course. A new kind of war broke out in 1914, a war in which machines mowed down millions of young men and devas-tated vast areas of Europe. Before war would re-ignite in 1939, Russia and Germany had set up totalitarian regimes. Hitler turned killing into an efficient, mecha-nized industry. Lenin turned the idea of democracy on its head, making the "will of the people" a kind of idol and himself its high priest. Stalin perfected this "religion" and arrogated to himself more power than any king with "divine right". Then the Second World War engulfed the whole world, causing sixty millions of casualties and destroying whole cities. No longer was war something that took place mainly on battlefields or between warships. Unseen submarines sank unarmed civilian vessels. Sophisticated flying machines rained bombs on civilians, and - at the war's end - we saw the power of nuclear weapons to destroy entire cities in an instant.
The 20th Century belied every promise that was placed in human progress. All the hopes of 1910 had turned bloody. The judgment, it seems, had come.
As the Second Millennium runs out, we stand at the end of an era. As God has been eclipsed, human life and society have disintegrated. Human reason was supposed to free us from the shackles of superstition and lead us to heaven on earth. Instead it brought the hell of total war, the Gulags, death camps, and genocide. If God really loves and redeems us, then we have to expect him to act.
Indeed, God has acted. A month before the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, Mary appeared at Fatima and promised that Russia would be converted, if only after even greater horrors that World War I. After the Second Vatican Council, a movement of charismatic faith broke out in the United States and spread around the world. Millions of Catholics were praying with expectant hope that God would answer. They began reading their Bibles with new eyes. Many who had fallen away from the Church returned and became witnesses themselves to Christ's mercy. Then in 1981, six young peo-ple in Communist Yugoslavia reported seeing an apparition of the Blessed Mother. Whether the events in Medjugorje actually constituted supernatural visions or not,* millions have found their faith in God and their devotion to Our Lady renewed through them. Within a decade of the first reported appari-tion, Communism had fallen throughout Europe - largely with-out bloodshed.
We can indeed see concrete signs of God's work in our present world. We can expect him to continue acting. The questions for us are: What does he intend to do? What does he expect of us? Many Christians expect God to intervene further before the century is out. Billy Graham reflected this expectation several years ago, when he commented that if God doesn't deal with this generation, "he's going to owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology." And Pope John Paul II has said that his whole papacy should be understood in terms of the coming Third Millennium, when he expects a "new spring-time" for the Church. However, both Billy Graham and Pope John Paul II have re-sponded in the same way to this age - by stressing the importance of evangelization and conversion.
The message of Fatima, the fundamental charismatic experience, the core message from Medjugorje, and of course the teaching of Vatican II all come down to a reaffirmation of the Gospel: God is real. He sent Jesus to save us. Have faith in him. Repent of sin. Pray with confidence. Mary has called for consecra-tion to her Immaculate Heart as a particularly fruitful way to devote ourselves to God. But there are many who see the situation quite differently. They see God as up to some-thing completely new. They have a different response, one that gives rise to the "Prophet for Our Times" (P.O.T.) trap. This response develops in three stages.
1. "All bets are off." What is happening now - so it is said - is so new and different that all previous spiritual ideas and standards no longer apply. In the past, Chris-tians were wise to mistrust "automatic writing" (where the seer's hand is moved automatically by a spiritual power - allegedly Jesus or the Blessed Mother). But now Christ is bringing about unity among Christians in a new and powerful way, and the Church needs mes-sages that a certain woman transmits. Or: Ever since the German and Dutch bishops broke the estab-lished rules and hijacked the Second Vatican Council, no bishop, pope, or council can be relied on to express the true faith in its purity. The Holy Spirit's guarantee of infallibility and indefectibility is no longer over the Vat-ican. Or: The bishops and priests have become so worldly and the institutional Church so bureaucratic that the Holy Spirit cannot live within its parish and diocesan struc-tures. New Spirit-filled local bodies must be established to build the Church, because the old ones are dead. In short, the traditions and practices of the Church are not simply in need of renewal; they are no longer any good. The old ways no longer work. Traditional wisdom and lessons of the past no longer apply to the Church in our new situation. Or so it is said.
2. "The Church can't cope, so normal church life is inadequate for today's spiritual needs." If all bets are off, we must discard traditional devotions and spirituali-ties. Novenas and Forty Hours, sodalities and societies, Third Orders and parish councils, even Mass and Confession don't confront the real conflict between God and Satan. They are nice for old people and those who need something 'safe', but - really - they are more like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Not only is traditional church life thought inade-quate, but so is traditional wisdom. Priests and bish-ops may be well-trained in theology - it is said - but most of them are unaware of the prophetic character of the situation today. They just don't understand what's really going on.
3. "God is raising up a new prophet." Because the normal, traditional, institutional Church is no longer able to cope, God is raising up a new prophetic voice to show us the way. This may be a person or a group; The Word of God covenant community got its name from their belief that God had made them to be his word, spoken to the state of Michigan and to the entire country. This prophetic voice might also be the Blessed Mother, but as revealed and interpreted by a partic-ular mystical messenger. In any case, what God wants us to do comes only through this prophetic voice. The guidance of theologians, priests, bishops, classical spiritual writers, and ordinary good Catholics is at best only marginally use-ful. It could even be harmful. Since these people don't know what really is going on, they can't tell us what we really need to do.
These three stages and the ideas they give rise to undercut the Christian’s confi-dence in the Church Christ has established and make the P.O.T. trap plausible.
One new vision runs something like this: "This is the age of the final confronta-tion. At the beginning of the century God set Satan free to attack the Church. Now God, with his armies in heaven and on earth, is getting ready to march against Satan's forces and deal them a crushing blow. Soon we will see the great chastisement and Christ's final judgment against sin. The Antichrist will be unveiled. The battle will culminate in the revelation and glory of God's faithful spiritual warriors." We read that John Paul II will be the last pope.* Books and pamphlets tell how to prepare for Three Days of Darkness that will descend upon the world, during which Satan and his hosts will fill the air and only those Catholics will be saved who remain indoors with blessed candles burning.
According to this scenario all bets are off. What God is doing is something completely new and unexpected. The entire human race will find itself either at war or afflicted by natural disasters.† The war will be led by the Antichrist himself, a man of hypnotic, even magical, charm. No earthly power will be able to resist him or his forces. The devil himself will empower him. In this battle, not only earthly powers, but the Church herself will be power-less. Total defeat will be certain - except for the secret army God is raising up with special power and wisdom to overcome the Antichrist.
Another less dramatic but more plausible scenario envisions the total subversion of the Church. Even now (according to this scenario) enemies of Christ are infiltrating the Church. These ene-mies are secretly Communist, secular humanist, or Masonic. Alarming numbers of them are already in the Roman Curia, preventing the Holy Father from doing what he knows he really must. He is virtually a prisoner in the Vatican, cut off from accurate information about the rest of the Church and prevented by traitors from saying what he really thinks. And now - it is feared - Freemasons (or Com-munists or humanists) control enough cardinals that they can decide who will be the next pope. This will mean the death of the Church.
Now let me be clear. Communists, secular humanists, and Freemasons do share a common enmity of the Catholic Church. Powerful enemies of the Church can do great damage. The English bishops, with the exception of St. John Fisher, defected from the Church en masse when Henry VIII declared himself head of the Church there. Commu-nists tried to destroy the Church in Russia and Ukraine. In the 1920s and '30s Freema-sons attempted to quash Catholi-cism in Mexico. And as Donna Steichen's book Ungodly Rage documents, radical feminists have successfully infiltrated many diocesan offices and Church teaching institutions. However, both the manner of their working and the extent of their power, as well as the remedy to their schemes, are significantly dif-ferent from those proposed by the apocalyptic scenarios.
These scenarios portray the Church as weak, confused, and divided - clueless about the true spiritual state of things. They imply she is not the "Bark (i.e. Ship) of Salva-tion". She is no longer founded on the Rock of Peter. Rather, the Church is com-pletely unprepared to meet the onslaught coming against her. Her only hope is a great mir-acle - and rescue by the remnant who will fight for her. To make this possible, God is raising up an extraordinary leader to put the spiritual weapons together and save the Church.
This leader must be a prophet, because only a prophet can know what to do. Because Satan controls the Church and the secular media, we no longer have reliable information about what is going on. God has to reveal this to us. Besides, all bets are off; the crisis is beyond the power of human reason to understand. Our responsibility, then, is to obey this prophet. If anyone stands against the prophet, then he stands against God. Doctrinal matters and charity toward others are secondary. An exchange involving the Protestant "Vineyard" movement illustrates this perfectly. This move-ment, led by a team of powerful "prophets", has been gathering large groups of men in convention centers around the country to pray and prepare for the coming battle and God's victory. Some evangelical theologians took these prophets to task, saying that their teachings did not square with Scripture. The prophets and their followers responded - in effect - that they are above criticism. It doesn't matter that they make doctrinal mistakes; the important thing is that God has given them the now word to gather God's men. Anyone who criticizes them is standing against God.
Obedience is paramount. "If we are going to defeat Satan's plan, we must stand together like an army. Each one of us must be fully committed to this body the Lord has raised up. Each of us must be fully submitted to the authority the Lord has put over us. And to wives, the Lord says, 'Let my men be free! Give them up to my work!'" At least one mainly Catholic covenant community went so far as to declare war on Satan. (We have to ask, didn't they ever take or renew baptismal vows?) When the Communist government in Poland outlawed the Solidarity movement in 1980, a prominent charis-matic leader publicly cast all the demons out of Poland. One group of otherwise normal Midwestern Christians (again mostly Catholic) - people who held normal jobs and lived in normal neighborhoods - pledged themselves to "obey their commanders" in everything, to hide their movements from the "enemies of Christ", and to be ready to give up their own lives in this battle, knowing that their commanders would see that their children were cared for. At least one prominent Marian group is moving in a similar direction, embracing authoritarian leadership and committing all their resources to prepare for Mary's next move.
Furthermore - according to the apocalyptic mind-set - the effect of even one per-son's disobedience or even of weak commitment is supposed to mean victory for Satan. Everything depends on obeying the prophetic instructions. Ordinary Revelation in Scripture and the teaching of the Church are not enough. "We need God's now word for his people." It is not enough to be morally good. We need God's specific command. A war is going on and the enemy is demon-ically clever. Therefore the prophet must communicate to us only on a need-to-know basis. Our job is to obey, knowing that we will eventually share in the glory of this great victory over the forces of hell.